I’m in a standing-room-only session of Emerson’s Marshall Meier’s Web 2.0 in the Plant presentation. I’d mentioned this presentation in an earlier post. It’s great to see the interest by the user community in this topic.
Marshall opened it up by discussing cool technologies that are coming on-line that you can use in your job in the plant. He defines Web 2.0 being about interactivity of the web sites, ease of use, and collaboration.
Marshall discusses the social bookmarking site, Del.icio.us and how you can easily tag content that interests you and discover what others have tagged. His example was tagging the ControlGlobal.com site. He next showed how you could explore what others who had tagged the same site, also were interested in. It’s a way to discover new content from those sharing the same interest as you.
Really simple syndication or RSS was the next area he covered. He showed Bloglines.com as a web-based application to manage your RSS subscriptions. I was pleased to see Emerson Process Experts in his subscription list.
Next was a quick review of Wikipedia and the wealth of information it contains by the contributions of people around the globe. YouTube.com provides user generated video content.
Google Maps is an example of dynamic page content which size, scales, drags without having to reload the page.
Next was a quick demo of Flickr, a photo sharing site which also has tagging and RSS subscription capabilities.
After this quick tour, Marshall focused his presentation on how these could be used in a plant. Here’s a few thoughts he suggested. Store your plant procedures on a Wiki. Bookmark procedures with a social bookmarking website. Another thought was to bookmark to links within your web-based process control and asset management applications.
Another idea Marshall had was add training videos on an internal video sharing/uploading site. He then opened up the floor to ideas from the audience. Collaboration using wikis seemed to be a popular discussion area. Given the technical expertise that automation professionals posess, this seems to be a natural path to explore.